Above is my on-line abridged version of Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Avatar, Part One and Part Two. My published unabridged translation with notes and exhaustive Index is frequently sold out and must be obtained during those intervals when it is available.

The details for ordering can be obtained through the following email address:

hermitage75@yahoo.com.au

This absolutely incomparable treasure, the contemporary Bible of our White Race, is predestined for the eyes of the true elite of this fast perishing world, the Aryans (or Ehreans) of Imperium Europa. This Holy Writ is like unto the New Testament, written not for entertainment or curiosity, but for the Creation and Destruction of Worlds.

The Translator (Brother Francis of the Brahmanic Order of Kristos-Lucifer-Wotan)

THE MEDIEVAL WORLD WAS HIGHLY CONSCIOUS OF A NOTION OF TIME WHICH TENDED TOWARDS AN END. NATURE AND SOCIETY WERE FOUNDED ON THIS PRINCIPLE AND MEN COULD ONLY PREPARE FOR THIS ULTIMATE EVENTUALITY
APOCALYPSE AND ESCHATOLOGY
1. The concept of eschatological time: The World Will End in 6000 Years
2. The Age of the World: The Gifts of Nature Have not Entirely Rotted Away
3. Pilgrimage and Apocalypse: Comets in the sky appeared and countless went in pilgrimage
4. Relics and the End of Time: We venerate the saints in their bodies or better in their relics
5. The Scallop Shell: It is not without reason that the pilgrims returning from the threshold of Saint James bear shells
6. Monasteries and the Feudal Order: There Are Those Who Pray
7. Compostela and the Mission of the Apostles: The End of the World
8. Constantine, Charlemagne and the Book of Daniel: As the knowledge of one God was imparted to all men, a single sovereign arose for the entire Roman empire and a deep peace took hold of all
9. Arab Invasion and Apocalypse: Beatus of Liebana
10. Iconography: Elders of the Apocalypse: Having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints
11. The Legend of the Last Roman Emperor: This will be the end and the consummation of the Empire of the Romans and the Christians
12. Oloron-Sainte-Marie: At the foot of the mountain on the Gascon side

1-The concept of eschatological time: The World will End in 6000 years

All along the pilgrimage roads to Santiago de Compostela one sees reflected in the stone carvings of the churches a deep preoccupation with the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment.
Although since the eighth century a new chronology had been devised which dated the calendar from the Anno Domini, the earlier dating from the Annus Mundi continued to coexist. This dated from the Creation and used a

combination of Biblical and historical material to calculate the year. Most chronologers and historians placed the birth of Christ somewhere in the fifth millennium. The subtext to Annus Mundi was the concept of eschatological time. Saint Augustine had written warning against attempts to calculate the timing of the Apocalypse and that the prophecies of the Bible should be taken as having symbolic value.
However literal interpretations continued to hold their grasp, even within the official church. According to these ideas Time was structured according to seven millennia. The end of the fifth millennium would bring the Apocalypse. This would be followed by the thousand year rule of Christ and the saints on Earth at the end of which Christ would return for the Day of Judgment.
Many early Christians had believed that these events would occur in their lifetime and for medieval man they seemed equally imminent.

2-The Age of the World: The gifts of nature have not entirely rotted away

To understand the mindset of the medieval pilgrim one should take account of the eschatological world view which was universally accepted at the time.
In the twelfth century, men could not help but notice that all around them lay the ruins of a great civilisation.
Temples, civic buidlings, great bridges and roads had crumbled and fallen into disrepair through neglect. What remained spoke of a glorious past, of a society whose organisational and technological capabilities were far beyond those of the present time.
And yet in the early twelfth century a monk, abbot of a northern French monastery wrote criticising those who praised the achievements of the ancients over those of his own day. In doing so he revealed an attitude prevalent in his time. Men believed that their world was quite literally growing old, that its period of greatness was now in the long distant past and that the Roman Empire had constituted a golden age.
What lay ahead was the Apocalypse and the task of society was to prepare the way for the inevitable: “Although pure strength was pre-eminent among the ancients, yet among us, though the end of time has come upon us, the gifts of nature have not entirely rotted away”, so wrote the abbot.
“Certain mortals” he continued, ”have developed the foul habit of praising previous times and attacking what modern men do … However, no discerning individual could prefer in any way the temporal prosperity of the ancients to any of the strengths of our own day.”

3-Pilgrimage and Apocalypse: Comets in the sky appeared and countless went in pilgrimage

now became a Christian shrine with a miraculous relic to attract Christian pilgrims.
“Comets in the sky appeared and countless went in pilgrimage. Their numbers were greater than the past age had ever heard of”.
So wrote Radulfus Glaber, Benedictine monk of the abbey of Cluny in his account of his own time in the mid eleventh century, observing an increase in travel to holy places.
In the tripartite feudal order, the pilgrim – temporarily at least, wore the same mantle of sanctity as the monk and cleric. The knightly and labouring castes who

lacked the spiritual benefits which were the privilege of the monastic vocation were fearful for their soul’s eternal destiny. As millennial Apocalyptic fears grew, spiritual rewards could be obtained by travelling ever greater distances to the important shrines, which offered the possibility of redemption and a place in Heaven.
As Glaber concluded, “many consulted in these matters about the meaning of this concourse. They were answered that it portended no other than the advent of that corrupt Jew the Antichrist, whose coming at the end of this world is prophesied in Holy Scripture”.

Bridge at Saint Savin

4-Relics and the End of Time: We venerate the saints in their bodies or better in their relics

In the Book of Revelation, after the breaking of the fifth seal, the author declares, “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held”

From early Christianity, it was the practice to venerate the relics of the saints. Relics were the bodies, that part that was left behind on earth when the soul had ascended to heaven. It was said that these were in many cases perfectly preserved and that rather than smell of decomposition they emitted an attractive perfume, hence the expression “to die in the odour of sanctity”. In reality it was the skeleton or a part thereof.
Men would have to wait until the End of Time to enter Paradise, but the saint ascended directly into the presence of God. Out of this arose the notion of their mortal remains being a conduit between Heaven and Earth. Prayers said before relics carried much greater weight.
The Christian cult of the saints held that they were of two orders: the martyrs and the confessors. That is, those who were killed for their faith and those who were celebrated for upholding and spreading it. The wave of persecutions of Christians which spread through Gaul in the early fourth century produced no shortage of martyrs and a canon of the Council of Carthage in 401, taking its lead from Revelation, stated that the bones of saints should be placed under all church altars.
The popularity of relics grew as more and more Pagans were converted. Their cults were transformed from the magical to the miraculous. Secondary relics, such as cloth worn by the saint also became widespread.
In the East an alternative cult had developed, that of icons – pictures of saints which held the same miraculous properties as relics. In about 790, the Frankish ruler Charlemagne issued a lengthy text to Pope Adrian on the question of icons. Charlemagne insisted on the cult of relics: “The Greeks place almost all the hope of their credulity in images but it remains firm that we venerate the saints in their bodies or better in their relics”.

5-The Scallop Shell: It is not without reason that the pilgrims returning from the threshold of Saint James bear shells

Although the scallop shell was adopted as an emblem by pilgrims to several shrines such as Mont Saint Michel, it was to become uniquely associated with the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The Liber Sancti Iacobi declares that “It is not without reason that the pilgrims returning from the threshold of Saint James bear shells”.
They were plentiful on the coast of Galicia where, presumably, pilgrims originally continued as far as the western sea shore as the final act of their journey to collect their emblem.
The Pilgrim’s Guide tells us that they were sold at the entrance to the cathedral by the middle of the twelfth century and by the year 1200 the selling of the scallop shell was regulated so that we know that one hundred scallop shell vendors were licensed at Santiago.
Archeological evidence for the association of the scallop shell with the Compostelan pilgrimage exists in the form of a shell which was discovered inside a tomb along the northern nave of the cathedral of Santiago.

Due to its location it is dated no later than 1120. The first written evidence for the scallop shell as an emblem of the pilgrimage is in one of the miracles included in Book Two of the Liber Sancti Iacobi which is dated 1106. Thus we can be certain that the scallop was used as a symbol of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela at the very start of the twelfth century and it seems plausible to conclude that a tradition had been established for some time before then.
In Antiquity depictions of the scallop shell in funerary imagery were intended to denote the heavenly afterlife and its use was appropriated into the symbolism of the early Church. The interior of the aedicule of Constantine’s church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem featured the form of a scallop shell carved into the niche.

It has also been noted that from prehistoric times, shells were placed around the bodies of the dead as part of funerary rites.
In Spain there seems to have been a particular association between the scallop shell and Christian imagery, going back to the Visigothic period. Examples are to be found at Merida and the church of San Tolme at Toledo.
These replicate very closely the image on the silver and gold repoussé cover of the Sion Gospel. The similarity extends to the flanking palm trees which refer to Paradise. A notable difference however is the substitution of the Cross of the Sion Gospel with a Chrismon on the version found at Merida and Toledo.
The Chrismon is a particularly Hispanic image and there is a suggestion that it may have been especially important to the Visigoths with its reference to the Book of Revelation, a text which took on a more prominent function in the Visigothic church.

The Sion Gospel is considered to be the work of Byzantine craftsmen at Constantinople and to be dated to the 570’s. It is known that the Visigoths looked to Byzantium for cultural influences, unsurprising when one considers that they shared the Hispanic peninsula for a time in the sixth century after the Emperor Justinian conquered the Roman province of Baetica.
The Visigothic images of the scallop shell repeated the Antique representation which always portrayed the scallop as a concave form, reflecting its most common placement in a niche. The Compostelan scallop shell is distinctive however, in that it is always presented on its convex side and its orientation reversed, so that the narrow end of the shell is at the top. Now resembling a shield rather than a receptacle this may simply be a matter of the change in usage from a sculptural architectural element into an emblematic form worn on clothing especially the scarcella, the purse or bag which became of one the attributes in depictions of Compostelan pilgrims.
The seashore to which Compostelan pilgrims directed themselves to collect their maritime pilgrim’s badge was not any seashore. It was in fact the

point of land known as Finisterra, the end of the earth and one may speculate further as to what significance this may hold. This was the edge of the known world beyond which lay the western horizon, whose mythological connotations include ideas of the Land of the Dead and the resurrection symbolism of the sun’s decline and subsequent rising.
To this day, the coastline remains known as the Costa da Muerte and the numerous Celtic remnants still found in Galicia have given rise to suggestions that there was at the headland a cultic site, the Ara de Solis.
The proposition that rituals involving a ceremonial journey of the dead were performed there, prompts the question of whether the pilgrimage to Compostela was an adaption of an earlier cult associated with the passage to the afterlife, of which the scallop shell as a vessel of transportation over the sea to a Paradisaical realm, remains an evocative vestige. This may be the source of one of the Apostle of Compostela’s legendary miracles, when a drowned knight was brought up out of the sea by the saint, covered in scallop shells and restored to life.
Sources:
The Pilgrims Guide to Santiago de Compostela William Melczer Italica Press 1993
The Miracles of Saint James Ed Thomas F Coffey, Linda Kay Davidson, Maryjane Dunn Italica Press 1996
Compostela and Europe: The Story of Diego Gelmirez Xunta de Galicia Skira Editore 2010 p.308 Victoriano Nodar
Images and Symbols, Mircea Eliade 1961

6-Monasteries and the Feudal Order: There are those who pray

As society moved inexorably towards the End Times a mutually supporting division developed, a caste system imported from the East. This was the Tripartite division: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured. In other words, the monks, the knights and the feudal serfs. Each performed a vital service towards the greater good in a mutually interdependent structure whose sole purpose was the preparation of man for Judgment. These were the moral underpinnings of the feudal order.
Those who worked the land provided the necessary food, the knightly aristocracy protected the other two divisions and fought to defend Christendom. It was the monks and clerics however, who provided the most vital function: prayer.

For it was considered that humanity was too sinful to be redeemed without constant prayer and so around the relics of saints an ever more elaborate liturgical ritual evolved. And so the monasteries were reformed, they received great donations from kings and the wealthy aristocracy for the provision of foundations and endowments. By the eleventh century European Christendom contained a network of thousands of abbeys and priories.

Santo Domingo de Silos

7-Compostela and the Mission of the Apostles: The End of the World

The Pilgrimage Roads to Compostela

Santiago de Compostela lies only twenty miles inland from the Atlantic ocean at the far western extremity of the European landmass, known by the Romans as Finis Terra, the end of the earth. For them the ocean was the Mare Tenebrosum, the dark sea. Since ancient times this coastline, known as the Costa da Muerte, the coast of death, had been

used by traders who sailed along it towards the tin mines of the Scilly Isles and Cornwall. It was an important trade route linking the classical Mediterranean world with the Celtic.
It was via these old trade routes that cultural and religious ideas were transmitted. For the Greeks the far west was considered the mythical Land of the Dead and they dubbed the inhabitants the Keltoi after Caillaech, their mother goddess.
Galicia, a remote land bordered by the sea to the north and west and the mountains to the south and east retained her Celtic heritage long after the surrounding area had been Christianised. Still today, the landscape contains occasional druidic dolmens.
At Finisterra the Celts had a major pilgrimage site, the Ara de Solis, the altar of the Sun. The cardinal points had symbolic meaning too. The East with birth and resurrection, the West with Death and the Afterlife.
Combined, these elements indicate that the area around Compostela had from prehistoric times been a significant place of pilgrimage associated with funeral rites.

Medieval maps depict a circular area surrounded by water with Jerusalem at its centre and Galicia at its western point. Christian conceptions of the world also regarded the west coast of Spain as the limit of the earth. Considered in the context of the Mission of the Apostles it was a significant location. According to widely held belief the End of the World could only happen when the Apostolic Mission had been accomplished, that is the Gospel had been spread to the furthest reaches of the world.
The Arab invasion of Spain at the beginning of the eighth century seemed to fulfil the prophecy of the Book of Daniel concerning the fourth empire of the World.
The Asturian abbot Beatus of Liebana was a refugee from Islamic Andalusia and the illustration of the Earth in his celebrated Commentary on the Apocalypse confirms the Apostle James as evangeliser of Spain. A number of prophetic ideas were now coming together.
Had the Mission of the Apostles been completed? Was the perceived threat to Christendom posed by the Arab invasion that prelude to Apocalypse prophesied in Daniel and Revelations? If so, what more fitting place to go in pilgrimage than that remote corner of the world.
The discovery of the tomb of the Apostle at Compostela a generation after Beatus seemed an inevitability.
As the Book of Saint James tells us with Apocalyptic foreboding: “As the Eastern Apostolic See was established by St. John at Ephesus, so was the Western established by St. James. And those Sees are undoubtedly the true Sees. Ephesus on the right hand of Christ’s earthly kingdom, and Compostela on the left, both which fell to the share of the sons of Zebedee”.

8-Constantine, Charlemagne and the Book of Daniel: As the knowledge of one God was imparted to all men, a single sovereign arose for the entire Roman empire and a deep peace took hold of all

Along the pilgrimage roads to Santiago de Compostela a recurrent sculpted image can be seen on the facades of the churches – a victorious rider. Invariably, beneath is a cowering figure being trampled upon. Who is this mysterious horseman? Commentators have long agreed that it represents an archetypal Christian monarch triumphing over the Jews but it seems impossible to distinguish which of the two most likely historical figures it might be: Constantine or Charlemagne, for both emperors developed legendary features fitting the same mythological purpose.

By the Edict of Milan in 313 the Roman Emperor Constantine had granted Christianity freedom from persecution after a lengthy period of oppression at the hands of his predecessor Diocletian. Constantine was responsible for Christianity becoming the state religion of the Empire even though it is often questioned whether he was a believer himself. Nevertheless, he ordered the construction of the first church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem and Saint Peter’s in Rome. He called the Council of Nicaea in 325 at which the Nicene Creed, the expression of the Christian Trinitarian doctrine, was devised.
His reputation grew in the Christian imagination during the middle ages largely because of Eusebius’ history. According to this, when Constantine was planning to fight the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 against the army of Maxentius, his rival for control of the empire, he experienced a vision which persuaded him to order his forces to fight under a Christian banner. His authority as a Christian ruler was further revered due to the document known as the Donation of Constantine, an early medieval forgery, which granted temporal power to the Pope.

The Franks were the first Christianised Germanic tribe and their ruler, Charlemagne was seen as Constantine’s successor, acquiring a vast empire the size of which had not been seen since the decline of Rome itself. Charlemagne was a conquering Christian monarch who, although he fought mainly against pagans in the Germanic lands, was conflated in legend with his father Charles Martel who had defeated the Arabs at the battle of Poitiers in 732. This halt to the Arab march through Europe was a legendary victory, the wishful prototype of later encounters with the Saracens of the Crusader era.
Charlemagne did much to restore a declining monastic culture in Europe and the Benedictine order of the eleventh and twelfth centuries looked to Charlemagne as their secular champion. Monasteries attributed their foundation to him as a way of asserting their power and autonomy and, at a time when the Papacy was threatened, Charlemagne was its protector.
On Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne revived the memory of Rome when he had himself anointed the first Holy Roman Emperor.

In referring to himself as emperor, Charlemagne may not have been thinking solely of his secular role. The notion of empire had been embedded in Apocalyptic prophecy since the time of the Book of Daniel and continued through the Book of Revelation and into the middle ages. These prophecies defined the span of earthly time in terms of four empires. They were either the Greek, Persian, Roman or Arab depending on the contemporaneous setting, but they were agreed that there would be a final evil empire which would precede the End of the World.
According to legend, Charlemagne was the first pilgrim to Compostela and liberator of the shrine of the Apostle James

Oloron-Sainte-Marie (with commentary)

The Legend of the Last Roman Emperor and the Prophecies of Daniel on the Pilgrimage Roads to Compostela

9-Arab Invasion and Apocalypse: Beatus of Liebana

After the Arab invasion, Christian Spain was restricted to a small kingdom north of the Cantabrian mountains called Asturias. It was from here that the origins of the Reconquest were born and that an abbot, Beatus of Liebana composed a famous commentary on the Apocalypse in the late eighth century.
The Christians of Asturias found significance in their defeat at the hands of the Saracens. These were events long prophesied.

It was reckoned that the Antichrist was now come and the End Times were unfolding. Beatus was one of the first to claim that Saint James had fulfilled his Apostolic Mission in Spain following the Pentecost and prior to his martyrdom at Jerusalem in A.D. 44.
It was not long after, in the early years of the ninth century, that the miraculous discovery of his tomb was made by a shepherd at Compostela. The location of the most important shrine of Western Europe at such a significant site as the frontier between Christendom and the Caliphate on the very edge of the known world, may not have been mere coincidence but it certainly had a great pull on contemporary imaginations. How the body had reached Spain from Jerusalem was the subject of an elaborate legend.
The manuscript of Beatus’ Commentary on the Apocalypse was copied in the monasteries which lined the pilgrim road, for a long time the front line of the war between Christians and Arabs.

10-Iconography: Elders of the Apocalypse: Having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints

Saint Pierre de la Tour Aulnay de Saintonge

Depictions of the Twenty-Four Elders are a recurrent feature of Romanesque sculpture in the twelfth century. Enthroned and crowned they variously bear musical instruments and bowls, goblets or phials. Numerous examples are to be found along the pilgrimage roads, most notably at Aulnay de Saintonge, Oloron-Sainte-Marie, Saintes, Compostela itself and most striking of all at Moissac.
The Biblical reference is from the Book of Revelation 4.4 And around the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. Along with the Four Beasts they surround in attitudes of worship and reverence an anonymous enthroned figure.
In Chapter 5.8 the Elders are described as: having every one of them harps and golden vials full of odours which are the prayers of the saints.

This is the scene which is represented at Aulnay de Saintonge and Oloron-Sainte-Marie.
At Oloron the tympanum of the western porch features the Descent from the Cross surrounded on the outer arch by the assembly of the Elders, twelve on each side of an apex featuring the Lamb bearing the Cross.
The south porch at Aulnay has four registers of voussoirs. An outer one of a phantasmagorical bestiary, a second of prophets and saints and a third of enthroned and crowned figures with their appropriate attributes of vials and musical

instruments identifying them clearly as the Elders, their penetrating gaze fastened on the Apocalyptic scene before them. Curiously they number thirty-one whereas the number of saints and prophets is twenty-four and several of the saints and prophets of the inner register bear also vials very similar to those held by the Elders. At the crown of the inner register is the Lamb.
The emblems which these figures share are the vials, instruments, crowns and perhaps significantly that they are all enthroned. In Revelation 4.10 the Elders fall down and cast off their crowns before the One.
That the most common Romanesque sculptural depictions of the Elders show them as enthroned when the text mentions also that they fall down in attitude of reverence, may be due to their conflation, by several medieval writers, with the thrones of Chapter 20.4: And I saw thrones and they sat upon them and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the Word of God and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
This passage follows on from the angel binding and

casting down Satan into the abyss for a thousand years and thereby associates the enthroned figures with the martyred saints and their millennial rule as judges.
This seems to explain the sculptural programme of the western porch at the Abbaye-aux-Dames at Saintes.
On the outer arch the voussoirs present the Elders and the inner arch the Massacre of the Innocents, identifiable by the Egyptian garb of the executioners.
The emphasis on decapitation and the adult proportions of the victims suggests that the Massacre of the Innocents is here seen as a prefiguration of the martyrdom of the saints.

The association of the two iconographic elements would imply a reference to Revelation 20.4 and evidence of the identification of the Elders with the anonymous Thrones.
This is given further weight by the inclusion, as in other programmes which refer to the Elders, of the Apocalyptic Lamb at the crown of the penultimate arch.
The Augustinian eschatological position was that the millennium signified the period from the Incarnation to the Final Judgment and that the millennial reign of Christ and the Saints on earth actually represented the present time of the Church. Thus the anonymous enthroned figures of Revelation 20.4 were a combination of Elders, Saints, Prophets and prelates of the church: the celestial and terrestrial churches combined.
Out of these elements of ambiguity the question arises of whether depictions of the Twenty-Four Elders refer to the Apocalypse or the Last Judgment or perhaps a combined image of both.
The ninth century Frankish Benedictine Rabanus Maurus included the Four Beasts and the Twenty-Four Elders in his text on the vision of the Second Coming in Matthew’s Gospel

At Moissac’s southern porch, among the most perfect of Romanesque sculptural ensembles, the tympanum presents the Twenty-Four Elders and the Tetramorph of the Four Beasts or Living Creatures as described in Revelation 4.4 but seated on the central throne in the place of the anonymous One, usually represented by the Lamb, is Christ in Majesty.

The Elders all have their heads turned towards the theophanic vision. Their postures are relaxed in the cross legged positions commonly reserved for regal subjects such as King David: a reference to their complementary roles as judges.
The surprising prominence given to Twenty-Four Elders in Romanesque sculpture along the pilgrimage roads is, in view of their relatively insignificant textual presence, perhaps explained by their most important attribute: the vials containing the prayers of the saints.

In that era when the cult of saintly relics was at its height, the Elders represented the culmination of the intercessory structure underpinning the Christian world.
At the crucial moment of Apocalypse and Judgment, those prayers made by the faithful to the saints via the mediation of the guardians of the relics, monks and clerics, were present.
The ultimate expression of this is at Compostela. The trumeau of the Portico de la Gloria

bearing the relief image of the Apostle James rises up to support the Apocalyptic image of the tympanum where Christ in Majesty is surrounded by the Twenty-Four Elders. The Apostle is presented as a conduit between Earth and Heaven, prayers and pilgrimage at his shrine will be transmitted through his intercessory aspect and held in the vials of the Elders.

Saint-Pierre-de-Moissac

11-The Legend of the Last Roman Emperor: This will be the end and the consummation of the Empire of the Romans and the Christians

Much of Christian eschatological thought was predicated on the notion of the four empires of the world from the Old Testament Book of Daniel, an important text in the medieval period. This dictated that the span of earthly time was to be divided into the dominion of four empires, the last of which would be a tyrannical and evil power. Its ultimate destruction in a great battle would inaugurate the Apocalypse.
These empires variously consisted of The Greek, Persian, Babylonian, Roman. The advent of the Babylonian and Roman empires caused much

stirring of Apocalyptic pronouncements for Hebrews as they were oppressed by each in turn. The Book of Revelation carries an implicit idea that it is the first century Edomite Herodian Jerusalem which is the final evil empire. Then, with the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the empire, Indo-European Rome was clearly identified as the New Jerusalem.
The sack of Rome by the Goths and the barbarian invasions of the early fifth century brought fresh prophetic proclamations. However it was with the Arab invasions of the Eastern Roman Empire in the seventh century that the notion of a Last Roman Emperor took root.
Originating initially in a text attributed to a Bishop Methodius, writing in a Byzantine empire then suffering the first wave of Arab conquests, the prophecy identified in dramatic terms the contemporaneous upheavals with the arrival of the last evil empire. It told of a sleeping emperor who would awake and lead an army against the forces of the Antichrist. As the victor in a great battle which brought an end to the strife endured under the evil empire, the Last Emperor would go to the New Jerusalem and place his crown

on top of the Cross at the Roman Golgotha. By this act he would surrender his temporal authority, thereby ushering in the events of the Apocalypse and the millennial rule of Christ and the Saints on earth.
These beliefs concerning Apocalyptic prophecy were translated to the West as the Arab invasions progressed across the Mediterranean and, it can be reasonably speculated, partly informed the attitude of the medieval Christian church towards Islam and the Saracen presence in the Holy Land and Spain.
With Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in the year 800, the torch of responsibility for fulfilling these predictions seemed to be passed on to the Franks. Around the year 950, Abbot Adso of the Cluniac monastery at Montier-en-Der, wrote a text in the form of a letter to the Frankish queen Gerberga on the subject of the Origin and Life of the Jew Antichrist. Adso was an important writer of the tenth century and his manuscript made full use of the prophecies concerning a Last Emperor.

“Even though we see that the Empire of the Romans is for the most part destroyed, nevertheless, as long as the kings of the Franks, who possess the Roman Empire by right, survive, the dignity of the Roman Empire will not perish altogether”, wrote Adso, clearly identifying the Carolignian Germanic Frankish kings as the inheritors of the Roman Imperial authority.

In Romanesque sculpture a recurrent theme is that of the Victorious Rider. There are numerous examples along the pilgrimage roads to Compostela. The horseman, always presented riding over a cowed figure beneath, represents the military strength of the temporal champion of Christianity with which the legends of Constantine and Charlemagne are endowed and which is assumed into eschatological thinking by the prophecy of the Last Roman Emperor, all of which fed into the Crusader mentality of the medieval world.
Notable examples of the Victorious Rider are to be seen at Oloron-Sainte-Marie and Parthenay-le-Vieux.

The Legend of the Last Roman Emperor and the Prophecies of Daniel on the Pilgrimage Roads to Compostela

Parthenay-le-Vieux

12-Oloron-Sainte-Marie: At the foot of the mountain on the Gascon side

Oloron-Sainte-Marie (with commentary)

Situated on the French Béarnais side of the Pyrenees, Oloron-Sainte-Marie, a cathedral town since the sixth century was a major pilgrimage station on the way to Compostela because of its strategic position at the bottom of the Aspe river valley which led up to to the 1,600 metre high Somport Pass.
This was the preferred entry point over the mountains for pilgrims travelling the Toulouse Road.
Making use of an old Roman road which had connected the city of Illoronensium in the province of Novempopulania with the

Hispano-Roman city of Saragossa, the town of Oloron benefitted from the traffic in pilgrims and trade with its counterpart Jaca, on the Spanish Aragonese side of the peaks.
After suffering at the hands of Norman raiders in the tenth century, the town’s fortunes were revived by the growth of the Compostelan pilgrimage in the eleventh century. Close links with Aragon led to a repopulating policy that was current in the Spanish Christian kingdoms of the north following the reclamation of lands from Saracen domination.
After 1080 when the Viscount of Béarn conferred the status of free men on its

inhabitants and restricted the powers of the church and lord, a merchant class developed which took advantage of natural surroundings rich in the salmon rivers and pork farming depicted graphically on the porch sculpture of the cathedral of Sainte-Marie.
The building of the town’s two major Romanesque churches, the cathedral and the church of Sainte-Croix coincided with the return from the Holy Land in 1104 of the Viscount Gaston of Béarn. Gaston had been one of the key figures of the first Crusade having devised the moving towers which had proved decisive in the successful outcome of the siege of Jerusalem.
Soon after his return from Crusading in the East, Gaston joined forces with one of the most prominent figures of the Spanish Reconquista, Alfonso El Batallor of Aragon. Their joint campaigns against the Moors culminated with the conquest of Saragossa in 1118.

Its proximity to the ongoing war of Reconquest in Spain, meant that Oloron was both a pilgrimage centre on the Compostelan road as well as a vital point of departure for Crusaders heading to fight for Christendom in the Holy War against the infidel.
This militant Christianity is reflected in the design of the porch sculpture of the town’s cathedral. Giant atlante figures at the base of the trumeau are clearly identifiable as Saracen prisoners.
A Victorious Rider sculpted unusually in the round, at the top of the right side jamb reinforces a Crusader conception. This figure of a horseman riding roughshod over a man trampled beneath is one of the great themes of Romanesque sculpture.
It appears all over France and northern Spain most notably on the pilgrimage roads to Compostela. It is most frequent on the Tours Road. Appearing in the Poitou region at Parthenay-le-Vieux, Airvault, Aulnay, Melle, Saint-Jouin-de-Marne, and Poitiers. In the Saintonge examples are to be found at Saintes, Chadenac and Pons among others and in Spain on the Camino Francès at Sangüesa, Carrión de los Condés , León and Compostela itself.
Whether the figure represents the emperors Constantine or Charlemagne

or simply an archetypal militant temporal leader, the cowed figure below seems to imply the triumph of Christian might over the Jews.
This recalls the Crusader spirit of the times but perhaps also the legendary prophecy of the Last Roman Emperor, who it was predicted would awake from a long sleep and make war against the forces of the Jew Antichrist. Having successfully defeated his foe, the emperor would ascend to the Roman Golgotha, placing his temporal crown on top of the Cross which had been erected there by the emperor Theodosius in the fifth century.
This symbolic act relinquishing temporal authority was the necessary prelude to the Apocalypse and the millennial rule of Christ and the Saints on Earth. The eschatological implications of the porch sculpture are reinforced by the Twenty-Four Elders carved onto the outer archivolt.

Often, although not too much, young people more or less introduced into the world of music speak to me, but without any knowledge of Richard Wagner, who after hearing about Wagnerianism, or about Wagner, are suddenly seized with the healthy intention “to hear” something from Wagner, sometimes more out of curiosity than anything else.

This curiosity increases when certain topics are included, even though their real foundation is distant from Wagner and in some cases poorly understood, such as for example the “Germanic” visions in some scenes of The Ring of the Nibelungen, or the comments, so frequent in the press (and so absurd or ill-intentioned), about the political or personal context of Wagner, when not other topics such as the promotion of famous lyric voices or the collecting of various record labels.

The goal among such students of entering into Wagnerianism is good, but the motivation is wrong and the way forward is terrible.

If we truly want to enter into the world of Wagner, then the motivation and the means of entering into his works must change.

The Motivation to be Wagnerian:

‘Laciate omnia política’ we could say, paraphrasing the expression “Leave behind all hope ye who enter here,” the sign that Dante puts over the entrance to Hell.

If one wants to be Wagnerian for mythological motives, for the love of singing or politics, then he is prostituting the works of Wagner, will never understand them and, what is worse, will get entangled in a world of false symbolisms and neurotic interpretations that will only make him outlandish, but not Wagnerian.

We must want to enter into Wagnerianism through our own personal, artistic and humanistic motivation, and not for the sake of a low level imitative politicking that lacks consistency.

Therefore, the first thing to do is to consider whether we really want to take an ‘artistic’ approach, with emotion, a path of personal and social elevation through art. If that is not the feeling and the desire, then it is better to dedicate oneself to something else and leave Wagner in peace.

The essential reason to be a Wagnerian is the desire to find a path of personal and communal redemption by means of art and sensibility, by means of the elevation of the Self and through Compassion for the Sorrow of the world. That is, to find a way for a Dramatic Conception of the World that resolves the essential questions of man: What to do in this world of material pain and deception? How to raise our Self above mere pleasure or living beneath the mere appearances of happiness? How to bring the elements of elevation and sensibility to people?

To develop this theme I published a book, “Wagnerianism As the Conception of the World”, and I think it superfluous to insist on everything that I have already fully stated there. (Translator’s note: The translator has also translated this book, together with several other highly relevant Wagnerian texts. Dear reader: Read them!)

Wagnerianism and the Scale of the Arts:

If we want to simplify the path of art in six words, and with that I note that every simplification is tremendously unjust, I would say: Beauty, Spirituality, Character, Feeling, Wagnerianism and finally, Neurosis.

Art begins in earnest with the sense of Beauty as the essence of art, then goes through a path of mysticism and spirituality, resumes with the Renaissance the sense of beauty, but then already not only physical but the beauty of the character of the person, beauty both physical and psychic; then everything rises in Romanticism towards pure feeling, the sensibility of the human being; reaching its maximum peak in the Total Art of Wagnerianism; … and ends falling from the heights into the deep hell of madness and sickly neurosis in the so-called contemporary art.

Therefore anyone who confronts the knowledge of Wagnerianism must first understand something of Greek art, the mystical meaning of Christian art, Renaissance classicism and above all Romanticism.

Each step provides an essential rung on the climb up to Wagnerianism. Greece gave the essence of Tragedy, its definition and exact precision, in an incredible advance for every subsequent step upwards, but with means absolutely insufficient for the achievement of its perfect expression. Then Christianity gave the compassionate and spiritual essence that is necessary if we are to address the sorrow of the world with hope. The Renaissance brings great music together with Calderón or Shakespeare, forming one of the bases of Wagnerianism. Romanticism brings feeling to music, surpasses mere beauty and brings sentimental expression. But only Wagner manages to unite the parts and give them their final unitary form.

And Wagner climbed so high that the successor dwarves did not dare to climb any further, so they decided to go down to hell rather than compete on the heights.

It will not be superfluous for those who want to enter into Wagnerianism to have a prior idea, even though superficial, of the History of Art, for which they must avoid, first of all, reading any of those nefarious books of historical Marxism that pretend to explain every art based on the economic or social relations of the moment, something that is like explaining the emotions of a person solely based on knowing the current balance in their checking account.

So choose a book of Art History, preferably from before 1936, and be aware of the steps on your journey.

The three bases of the Wagnerian Path:

To enter the Wagnerian world it is necessary to delve a little more deeply into three concrete parts of the previous art that form the cornerstones of its essence, and for which something more than a superficial or general knowledge must be claimed.

Wagnerianism tries to achieve a work of Art capable of expressing itself as a path of personal and communal Redemption, for which the work of art must express not only the generic feeling in every work of art, but answer much deeper questions: The why and for what of those feelings, the reasons and motivations that lead to the emotions and the outcome of those sentimental clashes.

Music is a perfect element for the expression of emotion, since it reaches directly into human sensibility without the need to reason, to be interpreted by reason, which is always an attempt against the feeling itself.

But music is unable to express reasons, motives and the outcomes necessary to make those pure feelings become a way forward, and not a mere personal show of emotions.

The development of the human theme is a drama, everything in the world that is serious and essential is reflected in the human drama. Tragedy is not only disasters or sorrow, but is the human development of emotions in a situation of conflict, and life is always a conflict, at least with death, love and pain.

Thus theatric Drama is another of the bases of complete art, the part that manages to express the why of the feelings, their logic, their outcome, their tragic or compassionate journey.

The text in verse of the classic Dramas unifies the reasons, the beauties of the sonority, and for this a dramatic reading in verse is always preferable, even though not always possible.

Finally, theatrical drama explains the why of the emotions but normally, except in very isolated cases, does not show us the For What of the Drama, the philosophy that orients the drama and human life. Tragedy shows us a concrete example of human life, and that is exactly why Tragedy removes the generic, but like every work of art, the tragic theatre is not a philosophy class, not an Essay. Therefore something of the philosophy of the for what of man and his tragedy, his feelings, his life and his death must enter in as well.

The dramatic theatre: The Why?

In Wagner drama brings to light the deepest human emotions, from love to renunciation, from compassion to despair, ambition or hatred, heroism and redemption, strength and meanness. But each feeling is only fully comprehensible when we see it in its setting, when we know what produces it, what awakens it, where is its strength and logic, what feeds and what weakens it. And only the text gives us these data, only the dramatic poem.
These behaviours are based on personalities elevated or tragic, evil or heroic, but never vulgar. Neither Wagner nor Calderón nor Shakespeare are going to show us the soul of the vulgar television watcher, the protagonist in TV serials with their baseness or thoughts on an almost simian level. This is a theatre of passions, elevated or mean, but always profound. Hence we must read this theatre before approaching Wagner, we are not going to believe that in Wagner we are going to get pink novels, Freudian dramas and neurotic or hysterical themes á la Almodovar.
Within the dramatic theatre, the person who wants to enter into Wagnerianism must at least, as something special, cover three great foundations: The Classical Spanish Theatre (getting specific, we begin with Calderón and continue with some Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina), the dramatic theatre of Shakespeare and the German romantic theatre of Schiller.
As we suppose the reader doesn’t have time to spend a year on all this, let’s reduce the preparation on this theme to the book ‘Wagner and the Classic Spanish Theatre’ by J. Mota and M. Infiesta, to continue with at least the main works of Calderón (above all, La Vida es Sueño) and the same with Shakespeare (both his dramatic works, virtually every work, as well as the so-called historical ones, especially Richard III, Henry IV and Henry V, and those of the ‘Roman’ cycle such as Julius Caesar, Coriolanus or Titus Andronicus). Something from the dramatic production of Schiller is essential, perhaps Wallenstein and several others…
And after those one must get hold of the text of the works of Wagner that are meant to be seen, read calmly, like the works of profound theatre that they are, without hurry. One must not begin the vision of the work without having read the text at least twice on the day before and also know the development not only of the ‘action’ but of the dialogue and its meaning as well. For this it is very good to find some explanatory text of the work, which is nothing easy to do because the current ones are a garbage dump of commentaries. But if we can get hold of the texts of Chamberlain, Liszt, Lichtenberger or Angel Mayo, that is already much better. Fortunately the most important work, The Wagnerian Drama by H. S. Chamberlain, can be obtained in PC Word format, if the book cannot be found.
As for the texts of the works, there are many editions, and on the internet one can find them all on the Spanish ‘Kareol’. We also have the entirety of the texts on a disc in Word format. We recommend a text such as Wagner Poet? by Jordi Mota, Nº 29 (April-June 1998), in the magazine of the Wagnerian Association of Barcelona.

Music: What is its essence?

Compassion, if merely explained, is completely useless; compassion must be felt. Love is not achieved by reading its definition, but by practicing its very essence. Music transmits this essence of emotion that words only confirm or complicate.
It is therefore indispensable to distinguish between ‘pure music’, in which one seeks beauty and sonorous balance, and the music of feelings, when what is intended instead is to express ‘states of the soul’.
In Wagner we cannot do as with so many operas, hear the moments of arias or the musically most ‘melodious’ and then sleep thorough the rest. In Wagner we must follow the drama and remember that the music is at every moment one more language of that drama.
In music one must begin with Handel, with The Messiah and its heroic Arias. Then Bach, at least the Magnificat and Brandenburg Concertos. Finally the Requiem of Mozart. This is pure and elevated music. After this it is indispensable to begin with the Romantic music of feeling, no doubt Beethoven, the symphonies 3, 5, 7 and 9 at least. And the Egmont Overture. Finally, some Symphonic Poem such as ‘Mazepa’ by Liszt or ‘Don Juan’ by Strauss. Everything we can hear of classical music is good, but given that this is not a matter of making our arrival at Wagner too slow, we must at least include several ‘operas’ that prepare for Wagnerian Drama:
From Mozart ‘The Magic Flute’ and then from Carl Maria von Weber “The Marksman’ or ‘The Freeshooter’ would be the most adequate.

Thought: the For What?

We have already spoken about the motivations for being Wagnerian, but leaving those generalisations aside, there is a motivation in every work, an orientation for each concrete work. Therefore it is highly recommended that we ‘know the work’ before taking on its performance. But we must be clear: Wagner said in a letter to Liszt that to be present at his works he did not ask for public ‘understanding’, but only for ‘undeformed feelings and a human heart’, which is much to ask, as Wagner himself indicates, and more so in that time when the minds of the people were deformed by money and the propaganda for money and had egotism and the mere pursuit of pleasure and diversion instilled in their feelings.
Therefore it is necessary to distinguish between knowledge of the work and immersion in the general philosophy that surrounds the work of Wagner, the latter being merely recommended but in no way necessary. So on a scale of what is required for this subject of ‘intellectual’ preparation for the reception of Wagner’s works, we can suggest three stages:
1- For each to make a previous effort to free oneself, before the performance, from every material preoccupation, from hatred, from economic problems or problems at work, to cleanse the heart from the society that surrounds us and make ready to sensitise oneself to Art.
2- Try to understand the subliminal message, not philosophical but general, of the dramatic work at which one is going to attend. When attending the Mastersingers, the Gold or Parsifal one should in some way have a previous idea about each opera, about what message, what emotions, what orientation the opera has. One must not go to Parsifal with the same feeling as for the Rhinegold. Perhaps in that sense a small pamphlet that introduces each opera would suffice for that purpose, although the previously mentioned text of Chamberlain is no doubt more than fully adequate, as would be the book of Angel Mayo, ‘Wagner’ by Ediciones Península (Scherzo Collection).
3- When one feels prepared, and has time, introduce oneself to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, if not in depth then at least in general. But if one has read some of the works of Schopenhauer, then I think one is doing something sad as a Wagnerian… One is most likely making two mistakes:
Taking some of the most popular works of the great thinker, those least interesting for a Wagnerian. The ‘Parerga and Paralipomena’ or his aphorisms on Love, Women and Death, is the most profound and cynical, but is worthless for Wagnerianism.
On the other hand, the capital work ‘The World As Will and Representation’ is really fundamental to Wagnerianism, yet is a long, complex and hard to read work without a certain preparation.
So once again I would recommend a summary of the many writings as edited in Wagnerian reviews, and specifically the commentary in the book ‘Richard Wagner and the Thought of Schopenhauer’ by Edouard Sans, edited in the magazine Wagneriana, Special Edition, or also the book ‘The Wagnerian Conception of the World’, edited by Associació Wagneriana.
Also texts published by magazines of the Associació Wagneriana of Barcelona such as ‘The Culture of Entertainment’, by Jordi Mota, Number 35 (October-December1999) and ‘The Great Lost Style: On the fashion of rejecting the legitimate rights of Great Art’, by Joachim Kaiser, Number 45 (April-June 2002), both in the Wagnerian magazine. (Translator’s note: Click and view http://www.associaciowagneriana.com/es/. Website is in Spanish and Catalan.)

The Trap of the Voice: The Amateur Opera Singer

If the true advocate of Wagnerianism is already a good opera devotee, before anything else one should read Wagner’s ‘Opera and Drama’ beforehand, which is published in Spanish and Catalan. And in any case, it should be clear that in almost every version of Wagner’s works on the market, on CD, Video or DVD, in almost every one (not to say in every one) the orchestral version and voice is more than adequate, is correct, some more and some less, but always correct for the comprehension and approach to the dramatic feeling of the work.
No bad orchestra or nefarious singer will spoil the version that can be bought, but rather disgusting scenes that in a large number of cases (most, with few exceptions) are given in the videos and DVDs available.
It is not that debate over the differences in voice among Wagnerian singers is bad; moreover that debate is much recommended for the better understanding of the theme, but the important thing is not to fall into the operatic defect of ‘voice mania’.
What is absolutely different in Wagner from every other opera is the importance of the voice in the overall work. The Voice must be adequate, but is not the principal protagonist of the play, as often happens in operas. The Voice must comply with the expression of the drama and comply with the score, but in Wagner there are no ‘divas’, there must be none of them; instead there are actors who sing, not singers who shine with their voice. Of course a strong beautiful voice must project the acting and the play, and is necessary, but must never take precedence over the other components of the drama.
“Before everything else the singers must habituate themselves to the awareness that they have a Dramatic problem to solve first, and then they themselves will easily be able to resolve the lyrical problem.” Letter of Wagner to Liszt, May 22 1851.

All or Nothing: Complete Versions

Most Wagner albums that are not complete versions represent three types of contents:
Overtures of his dramatic works
Bits of his dramatic works (that at times have the effrontery to call themselves ‘arias’)
Non-dramatic pieces of Wagner
No doubt the third type are highly recommended, while the first two types are best not bought, since their audition gives us a ‘musical’ or ‘operatic’ version of Wagner that will in no way later help us to approach the dramatic works as such.
We must break with the idea, of operatic origin, that the plays of Wagner are a fabulous overture, sublime bits of arias, duos, choirs, etcetera and long intermediate recitatives. Whoever sees Wagner’s plays like this would do better to dedicate themselves to Rossini and leave Wagner alone and in peace.
One must go to the complete versions, if possible on DVD and not on Video, leaving the mere ‘audition’ only for cases in which the previous two possibilities have already taken place or are absolutely impossible.
It is precisely because of the need to ‘assist’ at a dramatic performance that can last for several hours that we are analysing how to ‘approach’ this performance without falling into mistakes that make the dramas ‘boring’ or ‘incomprehensible’.
If we go to a dramatic theatrical performance where the text is in German, we would surely have serious problems for the spectacle to interest us. The Wagnerian dramas are theatrical works in two idioms: the musical, which can be understood by everyone, and the poetic idiom in German, which we must therefore understand before entering into the performance.
Both languages complement each other and are interwoven into each other, so that they cannot be treated separately or understood one without the other.
The mere partial audition of a Wagnerian play is ‘just music’, which does not mean it is not marvellous and recommended for hearing, but that with that audition we do not enter into the Wagnerian opera but into its music only. As the mere reading of the text is the reading of an incomplete theatrical play, and thereby lacks the sensible message of the music.
When we recommend reading the text before the performance, and not, instead, listening to the music beforehand, it is because the music is a universal language that we will understand directly in the performance, while the text and the explanations of the text and its scenes cannot be understood within the performance. Even understanding German very well, it is often difficult to understand the entire sung text, and in any case the reading of the scene and commentaries about the work would be, in any case, always necessary.
Another question is that in starting with Wagner it is best to begin with dramatic productions from his middle period, not from his initial or final periods. It would be convenient to begin with Tannhäuser or Lohengrin, to continue with the Mastersingers, and only after this preparation to approach works such as The Ring of the Nibelungen, Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde.

DVD: Both Sides of a Fabulous Breakthrough

The appearance of the DVD has allowed two gigantic advances in the possibilities for attending a Wagnerian work at home: A high-quality audition and the possibility of sub-titles in Spanish during the performance.
These two possibilities make the use of the DVD for the initiation into Wagner more than advisable.
Unfortunately there is a very grave problem: If encouraged by these words we go to a store specialising in classical music and we look in the section for music DVDs, we will find quite a variety of versions of Wagnerian music dramas. If by chance we choose the one we want to see, it is probable that we will be disgusted to find an infamous version of the work, that will have NOTHING to do with Wagnerian drama.
The great evil of our day is that Wagnerian performances consist of three aspects: Music, poem-voice and theatric performance.
If almost every version is adequate in the aspects of orchestra and voice, on the other hand the most complete chaos reigns in the theatrical performance, with magnificent versions next to versions we can only catalogue as criminal. Not bad, not abysmal, but much worse, they are neurotic, authentic madness, damage so absolute to the works that these versions cannot be considered as Wagner’s operas, but as authentic anti-Wagnerian plays that attempt to destroy everything that Wagner wanted to do.
Hence it is indispensable to buy only the versions whose performances are correct, or at least acceptably correct. And this is a great difficulty for some works.
It is of interest to know which versions of each dramatic work can really be bought. We can currently recommend:
1975: ‘Der Fliegende Hollander’.
Director: Wolfgang Sawallisch. Stage design: Gerd Krauss and Herbert Strabel. Singers: Donald McIntire, Catarina Ligendza, Bengt Rundgren, Hermann Winkler, Ruth Hesse, Herald Egk. Duration: 157 minutes. A correct version made cinematographically, not for commercial sale and has been performed for TV several times.
1989: ‘Der Fliegende Hollander’.
Savonlinna Opera Festival. Director: Leif Segerstam. Singers: Franz Grundheber, Hildebrand Behrens, Matti Salminen, Raimo Sirkia. Duration: 139 minutes. Simple but correct staging. Commercial video edited by Teldec Video and released on DVD as well.
1982: ‘Tannhaüser’.
Metropolitan Opera House. Director: James Levine. Artistic Direction: Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen, Singers: Richard Cassilly, Eva Marton, Tatiana Troyanos, Bernd Weikl, John Macurdy. Sung in German with sub-titles in English. This video has not been offered commercially in Europe. Duration: 185 minutes. Totally correct. Commercial video edited by Bel Canto Paramount Home Video and on DVD by Pioneer Classics.
1990 ‘Lohengrin’.
Orchestra of the Vienna Opera directed by Claudio Abbado. Artistic Direction and Scenery: Wolfgang Weber and Rudolf and Reinhardt Heinrich. Singers: Placido Domingo, Robert Lloyd, Cheryl Studer, Hartmund Welker, Dunja Vejzovie, Georg Tichy. Duration: 222 minutes. Scenery is a bit simple but not offensive. Commercial video edited by R.M. Arts. Published on DVD by Arthaus Musik with reference 100956. With sub-titles in Spanish.
1989: ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’.
Symphonic Orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Director: Uwe Mund. Scenic Director: Jean-Claude Riber. Scenery: José Mestres Cabanes. Singers: Bernd Weiki, Kurt Rydl, Hermann Prey, Sue Patchel, Paul Frey, Marga Schiml, Ulrich Ress. Impeccable scenery and perfect scenic direction. Includes a documentary of 30 minutes about Mestres Cabanes. Not commercially edited, broadcast on TV.
1990: ‘Die Meissersinger von Nürnberg’.
Opera of Australia. The Elizabethan Philharmonic. Director: Charles Mackerras. Singers: Donald McIntyre, John Pringle, Paul Frey, Helena Doese, Rosemary Gunn. Set design: John Gunter. Stage direction: Michael Hampe. Duration 280 minutes. Stage design simple but correct. Video edited by Reiner Moritz Associates Tdl. Edited on DVD by Arthaus Musik with the reference 100122. Subtitles in Spanish http://www.arthaus-musik.com “Die Meissersinger von Nürnberg”. From the MET, with stage design by Günther Schneider-Siemssen, recently released for sale on DVD. Without a doubt the best option.
1984: “Die meistersinger von Nürnberg”.
Bayreuth Festival. Director: Horst Stein. Staging: Wolfgang Wagner. Singers: Bern Weikl, Manfred Schenk, Hermann Prey, Siegfried Jerusalem, Marie Anne Haggander, G. Clark, Almost totally correct.
1989/90: “Der Ring des Nibelungenen”. Complete.
Metropolitan Opera House. Director: James Levine. Artistic direction and scenery: Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider-Siemssen. Singers: Hildebarg Behrens, Siegfried Jerusalem, Mari Anne Haggander, Gary Lakes, Hanna Lisowska, Christa Ludwig, Kurt Moll, James Morris, Jessye Norman, Anthony Raffel, Matti Salminen, Birgitta Svenden, Ekkehard Wlaschiha, Heinz Zednik. The only completely correct version of the Tetralogy on the stage currently on the market. Commercial video edited by Deutsche Gramophone. Also on DVD with sub-titles.
1967: “Tristan and Isolde”. Director: Pierre Boulez. Orchestra and Choirs of Osaka (Japan). Scenery by Wieland Wagner. Singers: Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Hans Hotter, Herthe Topper, Hans Anderson, Gerd Nienstedt. Duration 206 minutes. A version with little correctness but there is no better one for now. Commercial video, black and white, edited by Legato Classics.
1993: “Parsifal”.
Metropolitan Opera House. Director: James Levine. Artistic direction and scenery: Otto Schenk and Günther Schneider. Completely correct. On DVD by Deutsche Grammophon with sub-titles.

The Wagnerian theatrical performance

Attending Bayreuth is currently one of the best ways of having to endure, almost certainly, the worst performances of Wagner in the world. So after eliminating the possibility of Bayreuth as the most appropriate, Bayreuth, the Temple of Wagner, is now converted into a Machiavellian laboratory of Mephistopheles, an alchemy that claims to convert the Wagnerian gold into genetically modified fodder, and the only way to assist at Wagnerian performances in theatres is to make oneself very aware of where and when the few correct versions are given in the world.
Abandoning any hope for the Lyceum of Barcelona, now in the hands of Alberic, one must travel and have truthful information about the performances that are worth the trouble.
Vienna, Budapest, New York, Wels, Seattle, Liège, Bilbao… are cities where there have been good performances, without any guarantee that every performance offered in them is good.
Hence it is very advisable to subscribe to magazines of a Wagnerian Association that supports good performances and combats current barbarities.
In this sense Wagnerian Associations have a vital importance nowadays, and must be the ones to inform the public without being in the pay of anyone, and least of all the official mafias, handpicked mafias that dominate the orientation of the theatres funded by the State. The Associations must provide good performances, the meaning of those performances, the relevant data and profound knowledge of Wagnerian texts, the entire milieu of the work of art of the future, not only Wagner but the entire work of so many composers and artists who labour to elevate the human person through Art.
Within this work it is absolutely important to read the 20th issue of ‘Wagneriana” magazine in Catalan, from the Associació Wagneriana of Barcelona: “Against the current artistic dictatorship… We call it dictatorship!” and “Stage Directors: Artists or provocateurs?” (also edited in Catalan), where we can read dozens of authorised commentaries about the need for correct performance and for criticisms against the absurdities, in some cases almost criminal, in the present performances in many places. (Translator’s note: Click and view http://www.associaciowagneriana.com/es/. Website is in Spanish and Catalan.)

Wagnerianism

Finally, if after attending the music dramas of Wagner, live or by DVD, if after reading the texts we have indicated, if after all this there is in us the idea that the Path of Wagner is something more than ‘music’, or more than a distraction or an artistic taste, something more than a given point in the history of music, much more than a few hours dedicated to art, but which is instead a personal Path of Redemption to improve oneself and to reach that Great Style, then and only then, is it good to decide to be Wagnerian.
It is advisable to read, for example:
“Qui som els Wagnerians?”, by Jordi Mota, issue 9: (November 1998), Wagnerian magazine, Catalan edition.
“History of the Associació Wagneriana, Spanish edition.
Wagnerianism is not an ‘affiliation’, a mania or a personal hobby, does not mainly consist in knowing the life of Wagner in depth or the details about his works, although that is necessary, but is about deepening oneself in the ultimate attempts of Man to raise himself up, to achieve a consciousness superior to pleasure, superior to a useful life, to mere existence in order to be ‘happy’, to the egotism of ‘my family and my money’, but is instead the ultimate effort of the Absolute Individual to reach their greatest possible sensuous, artistic, human and spiritual development.

Part Two: 1848: Ghibelline thought in the work of Wagner

In 1848 Wagner writes the first draft of the Ring, in his first title ‘The Death of Siegfried’, written shortly before he finished with Lohengrin (1845 – 1848) where he already took up the theme of the Grail and situated the action in Brabant, and in this same year he completed a sketch of a work he did not finish: ‘Frederick I Barbarossa’. A few years later the sketch of Parsifal began, although then he left it for many years uncompleted…. but thus said, everything seems simply a series of disconnected facts, or with no more connection than being works of Wagner. And yet there is a close relationship between these facts, a relationship that is very little known and truly surprising, concerning which we would have no proofs or be able to convince the reader, too often accustomed to extravagant connections and conclusions having no more basis than the desire of the scholar for originality, if it were not that Wagner himself has left us the key to his inner continuity in a letter of that same date, entitled ‘The Wibelungen’, in the summer of 1848.
In that year and the previous ones, Wagner was devoted to the study of themes related to German mythology: “I sought to be a master of this topic”, not a scientific expert but to be sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the ancient Germans The conclusions of his studies are described in this text, which is not a text of history but of emotion, a personal interpretation of the knowledge of the Germanic peoples. The conclusions Wagner takes away from this are surprising and explain many things about the genesis of these four works at their inception. Of course we must not forget that in 1854 Wagner discovers Schopenhauer and that at that same date he will write “Opera and Drama’, in which his thought comes into focus and he definitively analyses the why of drama and the use of plot; he encounters the motive and final direction for his Dramas, and everything will shift away from the use of historical drama and mythology as he saw it in 1848. Now nothing will be the same and the Ring or Parsifal will no longer be a theme oriented by the same thought as he had in 1848. But we return to 1848 and the conclusions of Wagner in that moment, concerning his readings and his work to conceive the global drama that we will call ‘Ghibelline’ and that led him to conceive in their mythological essence four ideas as diverse as: Lohengrin, The Ring of the Nibelungen, Frederick I Barbarossa and Parsifal. What is important is not the reality of the legends and their meaning, but that for Wagner this was revealed as a mystic poetic reality, as an essential and ideal reality that inspired a part of his work.

The Primitive Kingship

The central idea in Wagner’s text is the study of the roots of a ‘first-born royalty’, finding the traces of that idea of ‘king’ as the leader, both political and religious, of a Clan, a lineage, the Priest-King, with the feeling of shared identity linked to a lineage and to Nature herself. This emotion that is found in the Indo-European peoples of the Asian Caucasus, from whence the German-Aryan clans emigrate to Europe. And among those clans are the Franks, located in what is now Belgium, “where under the name of Wibelinen, a primitive kingdom raised its claims to aspire to the Empire of the world.” The leaders of that town always came from the same family or lineage. The history-legend reminds us how this lineage descends to the mythic-historic leader Chlodio, who defeats the Romans and generates the great idea of the Empire of ‘Nibergau’ (the Land of Mists, literally), there in the Frankish lands, north of present-day France.

The Nibelungen

For Wagner the legend is the reflection of a previous reality sublimated in popular poetry. Within the great clusters of primitive legends there is always an earlier Idea and then its incarnation in a reality, that when sublimated produces the legend. The earlier idea in this case, the primitive one, is the solar struggle, the Sun, the combat of the solar against the Dragon, against the Cave, the Night. The eternal and cyclic struggle of life and death. Similar to the idea in Greek mythology of the fight between Apollo (God of the Sun) and the Python snake. And this incarnates in the hero, in a Siegfried, a Chlodio, in “`a lineage of heroes, the Welsa… or the Wibelinen… Nibelungen, the dwellers of the Mists… When the Wibelinen defeat the Romans, the Dragon, they take their treasure and aspire to dominate the world that belongs to them in the same way that it belonged to Siegfried. The Franks, the Nibelungen people, are for Wagner already the Nibelungen, in that they have become conscious of their Ideal Treasure and their Destiny, and are leading the German ‘Alemanni’, Bavarians, Thuringians, Saxons… because the Franks eliminate their royal families and make them into dependencies. This is the lineage that descends to Charlemagne. In Nordic myth Wagner also finds Nifelheim, the Land of Mists, and reference to the Niflungar, the Nibelungen, but there converted into children of the mists, miners and sons of the Soil.

The treasure of the Nibelungen and the Frankish royal lineage

On defeating the Dragon, the Romans, the empire ‘of another lineage’, of the darkness, Chlodio takes the Treasure, perhaps the Roman Imperial Standards, not so much in their physical as in their spiritual value. Legend has it that when Chlodio died his children, except one even younger, were left in the care of his cousin Merwig, of the Merwegau clan, linked logically by blood with Chlodio and the royal Wibelinen lineage. This cousin kills Chlodio’s children and succeeds him, appropriating the Treasure, and this is the origin of the name of the Merovingians. But a son of Chlodio survives, and upheld by the people this son will return in his lineage as the ‘Pepins’ (popular name of endearment given to them by the people, since their triumph was due to popular support), thus becoming the first-born root that will descend to Charlemagne. Wagner reminds us that in one of the legends of the Nibelungen, Siegfried de Morungen (of Merwegau, the Merovingian lineage), when he conquers the Treasure of the Nibelungen, refuses to share it with the children of the Nibelungen as he had promised and keeps it instead. Be that as it may, we come to a primitive root stock, the Wibelins, the Nibelungen, keepers of the Ideal Treasure, confident in their rights over the world, heroes and imperial princes, who establish that feeling as that of Charlemagne’s empire, together with the Avar Treasure of Charlemagne, famous in his time. Wagner devotes a chapter to explain how in Frankish legends a Trojan origin is claimed for the Frankish clan, considered to be continuators of Priam, in an attempt to record the distant, oriental origin of the first-stage Sacred City of the Clan. At every moment the Carolingian lineage feel themselves to be the blood ‘descendants’ of that ideal primitive Soil.

The Welfs or Guelphs and the Nibelungen or Ghibellines

Wagner finds a Germanic legend about the ‘Welfe’ lineage, name that means ‘fed by the mother’, by the mother wolves, and that in itself means ‘son of a true mother’. This Swabian clan refuses to accept the royal investiture at the hands of the Frankish lineage of Charlemagne, thus refusing to accept their dependence. This is the rebellion against the Nibelungen, against the Imperium. When later, already in historic times, the Empire arrived on the Italian lands, as we shall see, with the Italians pronouncing the German names in the form in which they have come down into our current language: Welfe replaced with Guelphs, Wibellnen with Ghibellines. Words with meanings similar to those of the legend, but with connotations that we shall see later when we understand how the initial Frankish legend and the ideal Carolingian Empire evolved historically, whose Nibelungen origin Wagner has come to base on his studies in the Frankish and Germanic legends.

The Ghibelline Empire and Frederick I Barbarossa

The appearance of German lineages that led a moral and physical resurgence against the Carolingians begins with Conrad of Franconia, and is carried through with blood marriages into the Carolingian lineage, until Otto I achieved the ‘unitary’ conquest of the German clans. Emperor Conrad II the Salian, of Carolingian lineage, and Lothar of Saxony cause the Carolingian, Ghibelline, Nibelungen dramatic role to pass into the Saxon and other German lineages, creating the desire to continue the Carolingian Imperium. From the beginning the Nibelungen descendants, now the Germans, have a ‘Roman’ aspiration, at every moment attempting to serve that (Holy) German Roman Empire…. Spiritual-Imperial, Church-State at the same time. Frederick I is directly descended from the Nibelungen Saga, from those first-born royal lineages with imperial aspirations in the Ghibelline-Nibelungen sense. They carry the idea of the primitive royalty in their blood: the Priest-King. The Pope must be the first official of the Empire, a delegate of the Priest-King in matters of Cult, that Supreme Priest who already existed in the Ancient Roman Empire, but always in the service of the God-Emperor.
The life of Frederick I was always a struggle for this ideal: First he had to conquer or make a pact with the German Guelphs, advocates of independence, isolationists, and thereby unite Germany. Then dominate the neighbouring peoples that threatened the Empire, the Hungarians, Poles and Danes. Achieving all this, he was strong enough to address his two main problems: First integrate the Church of Rome into the Empire, and second gain the Treasure, the Myth, achieve what could be expected in order to defeat the Dragon again and regain the Myth of the Nibelungen, so that his Empire was once again the ideal first-born of the Wibelinen…. the Quest of the Priest-King, this time converted into the Grail Kingdom. Against Frederick I there were three enemies:

The German Guelphs, those who saw in the Empire the succession of Franco-Carolingian rule, and therefore an attack on their extreme individualism. Whether defeated or integrated, there were always small Guelph revolts in Germany.
The Church of Rome, which tried to achieve the same goal as Frederick I but the other way around, without Political or ethnic-national sense: to achieve the power of the Supreme Priest over the imperial power. And their principal weapon: excommunication and fomenting rebellion against the excommunicated Emperor. Frederick achieved mighty victories and influence in Rome over the Papal power, but was never able to convince the Papacy of its imperial destiny.
The Italian Lombard Guelphs, with Milan at their head, opposed the Empire with their tradition of ‘cities’ apart from natural Clan and Caste. Independent cities, without tradition of Empire, unity and common destiny.
Extreme Individualism is always the enemy of the Imperium, the power that wants to be too personal, detached from the Ethical Community, from the Natural sense that belongs to the Carolingian-Nibelungen lineage given as something settled in legend and the past, by divine right. Wagner sees in Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa the great continuator of the first-born lineages united to legend, with consciousness of Legend, and a sacred destiny that is not merely temporal, material. The military defeat of Frederick by the Lombard League meant a setback in the Italian adventure of the Emperor, but not his final defeat or the loss of any great part of his power.

The ideal meaning of the absorption of the Nibelungen Treasure into the Grail

For Wagner once the Carolingian Treasure disappeared in its ‘physical’ historical aspect, the Empire comes to seek that Ideal Treasure that must be Nibelungen, must be the Hero. The Treasure incarnates in the idea of the Grail, the idea of a first-born Kingdom located there in the Orient (in reality when Wagner later located it in Moslem Spain, he still followed that idea of ‘Orient’ but made it close and accessible to the Franco-German knights of the Grail), where a Priest-King, Amfortas, reigns in peace and perfection, and is the perfect Empire, with the Grail, the Ideal Treasure. A Treasure that has now been lost and was in the hands of the Dragon of Islam, that slept on the Treasure in the Holy Land. Among those legends Wagner finds the one of the Knight of the Grail that, after causing great prodigies, disappears when they ask for its origin and lineage. And that must happen, is the logical thing, in the land of the Nibelungen, in Brabant where the cradle of the Carolingian lineage was… this is the connection with Lohengrin. Actually Henry I the Fowler is one of the ancestors of that Nibelungen-Wilbeinen lineage that culminates in Frederick I. Frederick I reunited the entire Empire in Mainz, made a pact of peace with the Lombards and forgives them for their rebellion, reconciles with the Guelphs and attempts to convert Rome to his ideal plan: the Crusade of the Grail, the conquest of the Nibelungen Treasure. With this he intends to fulfil his Nibelungen destiny, to be the Priest-King, to kill the Dragon and to have the Treasure, the Grail that will give him power in Rome as well. He gathers a tremendous army, defeats the Islamics in Asia and when he is at the point of achieving his goal… he drowns in a river … his body is never found and the legend of the Grail expands throughout Europe with the telling of a series of Grail legends.

The End of the Nibelungen lineage

The lineage continues with the great Emperor Frederick II, but then suddenly dies, or rather is exterminated, ends as a lineage, on the execution in Naples of Conrad, the ultimate descendant of this lineage, at sixteen years of age, at the hands of Charles of Anjou, a Capet who, as Wagner very well indicates, is the prototype of the new monarchies already completely removed from the first-born root, the non-Carolingian monarchies, the monarchies of temporal power without desire, root or will superior to the material. The Capetians, come from nothing, without ancestors, without lineage, without the thread of Tradition, without the Ideal Treasure, seek only Property, power, money. The Ideal Treasure becomes Personal Property. In this way, Wagner connects us with his Ideal of the Nibelungen lineage, far beyond the Ring, as a network of relationships that begins with the Nibelungen, continues with the Ghibelline Frederick I and ends in the Grail of Lohengrin and Parsifal, the Priest-King in the Ideal Kingdom. A text of Wagner really little known and that gives us as his own conclusion that the Ideal Treasure is henceforth and forever only in the hands of poets and troubadours, of sensitive art… in the song of Richard Wagner.

We face an extreme situation in the Church. For convenience I distinguish three contexts, summarily outlined.

First, that of the sect, the GREAT SECT established and nourished canonically and doctrinally by John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II, and almost all the bishops.

Secondly, the Sect of Écone, founded by Marcel Lefebvre, with the approval of Paul VI; claiming for itself the support and upholding of Tradition. This sect is a true cephalopod. In spite of its divisions, ruptures and internal dissidence, the sect undoubtedly brings many Catholics together, whether mitigated or not, who are disillusioned by the machinations of Rome-Vatican II.

And finally, the lineage of bishops and faithful whose canonical and spiritual head is the Vietnamese Archbishop Monsignor Ngo Dinh Thuc, who was disputed, ignored, vilified and perhaps assassinated.

Among the faithful, in turn, there has been a complex and difficult dispersion, already foretold in Matthew 26:31 and Mark 14:27: percutiam pastorem et dispergentur oves. This text, and other concurrent ones, announce not only the passion and death of the Lord, but also the Gethsemane of the Church. In this time we are without a shepherd. How then interpret the words “percutiam” and “dispergentur”?

Only a single path remains for the Faith. To be proclaimed, in order to face the Apostasy, explicit or latent, whatever its manifestation.

In order to meditate on this “mystery of iniquity” that is the Apostasy, I prefer to divide up the semantic fields that shape its development, in these last thirty-five years, without ignoring the antecedents that go far back. However in these thirty years the Apostasy has explicitly claimed authority for itself, an authority put in service to a conspiracy against the FAITH, to extinguish the FAITHFUL. For this is the first thesis that must be reaffirmed: APOSTASY is not a state – passive, unarmed, through corruption or extinction of the FAITH and FAITHFUL, but instead something that does not at all take into account the – MERCY that derives precisely from the FAITH. We have gone from good-natured and humanitarian APOSTASY (John XXIII) to militant, totalitarian Apostasy; and against this there is only one answer, whose model is the protomartyr Stephen.

The second thesis outlines the very nature of the Apostasy. It is not a warlike kingdom, led by superb captains leading to the conquest and death of Christians around the world. It is rather a manipulation, sweetness, humanism and charitable emotion by which to coalesce, emulsify, make mindless and fulfil the total transformation of the MAN OF FAITH.

The third thesis demonstrates the strategic conduct of the Apostasy in the Arian Rome of John Paul II, whose kingdom is nearing its end (I am writing this on July 31, 1992) aiming to cede this strategic leadership to an “apostolic” tyrant with a new face. The combat will therefore increase and the FAITHFUL will live in solitude.

The strategy to which I allude consists, in the purest Leninist style, in marches and counter-marches, always to advance the destruction of the faithful. Because of that we will speak in another paragraph about “Apostasy with the Face of Tradition”.

The three theses, which include vast influences, are therefore: 1) The Apostasy is an active, hierarchical militancy; 2) Apostasy is not a warlike kingdom, it is a manipulation in sweetness and obedience; 3) The third thesis, in short, confirms a strategic globalist management, espoused by Arian Rome, the centre of “world power”.

I will briefly examine the areas we could demarcate for the profile of Ecumenical Apostasy, totally opposite the Eudokia of the angelic Song of Glory. This, the Glory, is Light, fulguration, splendour. The Apostasy is the domain of okoria against the light (Cf. the Johannine Prologue).

I would distinguish then Liturgical Apostasy, Canonical Apostasy, Theological Apostasy and Temporal Apostasy, both cultural and political. And, finally, Apostasy with the Face of Tradition. Let us therefore see each semantic demarcation, without prejudice against maintaining a discreet resumption of other details. My document claims to be a document of systematic reflection, but not a reductionist closure of the same theme seen from other perspectives.

Liturgical Apostasy

This consists substantially in the destruction of the Roman cult and rite, replaced by confusing adulterations. But here we are interested in the vast consequences implied by the collapse of prayer, or of mystic interiority as the continuity and continuation of the Logos in history. Since within the effects of this “apostasy” massive spaces of power grow, not in terms of territories, countries (geography, we would say), but as regards concrete humanitas (America, Europe, etc.). Since those “spaces of power” within global geopolitics establish a new sacredness within global geopolitics, disconnected from all myth, from every rite, from every priesthood. It is the “factual sanctity” of paradise, stripped of every symbol and every unifying and fulfilling military advance, to rest in the pure carnal knowledge of the “Giants”. Therefore I consider “liturgical apostasy” as the primordial sign of tyrannical planetary globalisation.

Canonical Apostasy

To the res eximiae that is destroyed in the first phase, follows the destruction of letter and/or sacred text, which in Christian Antiquity is a degree in the incarnation of the Logos. Thereby every possible level of the “letter” in its reference to divine things is interrupted, and this also suppresses the substance of the branches of the res publica, as the domain of the renewing, living and multiplying logos. Some of the effects are in the Ecclesia and other effects are in the Civitas. The power to generate new geopolitical spaces, filled with alienated masses, therefore also comes from Canonical Apostasy, made explicit in the “New Evangelisation”, the New Christianity emptied of divine-human semantics.

Theological Apostasy

This has a devious history, of course. But we must refer in particular to the broad outline described by Cardinal Siri ( † ) in his book that was mysteriously silenced and made to vanish by the Arian heresiarchs of Vatican II and its hierarchy that is thereby annoyed and also deposed according to the Bull of Paul IV. (See GETHSEMANI – Reflections on the Contemporary Theological Movement – Editorial Hermandad de la Santisima Virgen Maria, Centro de Estudios de Teologia Espiritual, Coleccion “Pensamiento Catolico”, Toledo-Avila, 1981). From Jacques Maritain to Henri de Lubac, who has just died, this Apostasy is summarised in the dispossession of Grace and Holiness from the once Christian people. Rahner, Lubac, Teilhard de Chardin, and among us Ismael Quiles and other false doctors, have consummated the destruction of the theological edifice, as sign of the demolition of the “Celestial City”, that is, the edifice of the Church, as anticipated by Anne Catherine Emmerich, in her Visions, and before her, by Saint Hildegarde. But the confluence of this Apostasy with the Acherontic globalist powers activates and represents “the destruction of humanity”. Hence “Apostasy” and “Power” is a fundamental datum for understanding the questio that we propose in this brief note on Geopolitics.

Cultural Apostasy

We thus descend to the vast expanse of what, as a recapulatory comfort, I call “cultural apostasy”, that was in its way outlined by Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind. Nevertheless in this chapter I mean the linguistic apostasy of the Hyperborean origins, and hence semantic, cultural, aesthetic and political apostasy, whose effect is the totalitarian and planetary “emulsion” from whose darkened level must arise “the god of the Aeon” (theỏs tou aionou toutou) as function and exercise of planetary power. We will call this the “apostasy” of the Nous, noetic apostasy in search of the massive reign of the governing biological function (i.e., the Talmudic imperative of unnatural Judaic birth as the supreme anti-value — translator). No longer the clarity of the Johannine fire, nor the regency of the Hyperborean and Agapistic Logos.

It still remains to outline the Apostasy with the Face of “Tradition”, the “tradition of always” in the midst of the Great Apostasy, that in reality calls for a Saint Athanasius, or a Saint Hilary of Poitiers. That is why I have called Écone the “collateral” of apostate Rome (See La Hosteria Volante, issue 31, year 1981).

This “apostasy” that one would rather call the coercion of ritualism, confronted with the subversion of cultic worship, is capital disobedience as a way to hide the most ancient currents of the Priory of Sion beneath sectarian goals, perhaps infiltrated collaterally from the old Templars, political elitism as the shield of a subversion against the Imperial Reich, and contempt for the culture of the Great Greek Councils and the Great Doctors of the Church, all this as prelude to a profound division of the Roman Church in her doctrinal, mystical and cultural aspects. The underlying Tradition is thereby extinguished ab initio under the banner of the Mass of Pope St. Pius V and beneath great declamations of piety. The authors of this dangerous diversion of the fight for the Faith are Paul VI and Marcel Lefebvre, having its canonical origin in Hebreo-Masonry, something entirely opposed to the works of Pius X and Pius XII. What path is left for the Church but Gethsemane and the anchoritic desert? Diverse sectors in what I would call the front of sedevacantism, embarked on the program of eligendus est papa (that is, somehow set up by an imperfect Council), put me in the ranks of the pessimists (See among others the magazine Kyrie Eleison). But it is not like that. So my view should be clarified again. There is no pessimism in the “fight for the Faith”, according to the meaning explained in my interpretation of St. Athanasius. The Faith can produce the miracle of displacing the mountain of lies, among others those that cover with darkness the sacred function of the Roman pontificate. To confuse the curate with the living Head of a living man is the magistral work of Clerical Apostasy, the only one that definitively interests us as a Luciferian (Yahwist or Jehovahist — translator) direction against the Faith.

My views are very clear, although in the daily situation they make no claim to be exhaustive. I accept every criticism of my modest theological work, undertaken since the departure of Pius XII. But the term “pessimistic” suppresses the virtue of hope that accompanies the Faith. For Faith is, as I have explained for almost fifty years, the utterance of Faith, it is the semantics of Faith. And if not, it is NOTHING. Apostasy is also a Luciferian utterance – loqui sicut draco – and therefore semantic meaning that seeks to darken the Faith.

The Spaces of Power

According to these life-size scales the spaces of the earth, of the races, the languages, and one would say, of the cosmos, are divided up through the work of esoteric lodges, repositories of this new anthroposophical power, remodelled by the New Science of the Big Bang, new evolutionist and atheist gospel. It is the religion of atheism that arises from the apostate Jesuits already mentioned. It is das glauben der Gottloser, the “faith of the godless”, the Leninist faith triumphant in the world.

The “spaces of power” will probably be resolved, as Vladimir Soloviev understands them, between the “yellow race”, the “black race” and the “white race, as can be seen in the panorama of the United States. And also in these so dramatic instances for those who rethink the history of Our America and her confrontation with such spaces of power, that are massive, massacring, manipulative and counter-human.

Our theological struggle, initiated at the Cardinal Cisneros Institute of Classical Culture (La Plata), thirty years ago, together with the Institute “Saint Athanasius” (in Cordoba) is today dissolved by the tactical demands of merciless combat, in our theological struggle that invests a Geopolitical idea, facing against Rome, the head of Christian Apostasy.

The peripheral wars that continue without pause and without reluctance to massacre the innocents, also find their response in the Intifada, in which Palestinian adolescents and youth fight with slingshots against the powerful and highly technological army of Israel. Slingshots, models for our Second War of Independence, which is a cultural, political and theological war, in which we wield the absolute meaning of the Agapic Gospel, the Culture of the Theandric Sign and the Politics of Constructive and Peaceful Empiricism against predatory and usurious nomads that we must expel from our sacred land. But this confrontation also results in a doctrinal struggle against the clerical rabbinate of the West, against the Roman Talmud that seeks to subvert the ontic and mystery root of the Church, and thus to block the “springs of culture”. Thus we simply and comprehensively sum up the complex semantics of a work founded by Saint Athanasius, the Great Doctor whose inspiration we implore.

[Introduction to Against Usury, published in Spanish in 1987 as Contra la Usura by Gottfried Feder ; Serrano [contribuidor]. Santiago, Chile: Alfabeta Impr. Spanish translation of Manifest zur Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft des Geldes]
Comrades, as you well know, it has been my honour to write the preface to the first revelation in Chile of the true Bible of our time: Mein Kamph, by Adolf Hitler. And now, this introduction to the book by Gottfried Feder: Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Money Interest (Das Manifest Zur Brechung der Zinsknechts des Geldes), first published in 1919. Such was the importance of the analysis and solution outlined in the Manifest and proclaimed in lectures, that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

For the first time in my life I heard a discussion which dealt with the principles of stock-exchange capital and capital which was used for loan activities. After hearing the first lecture delivered by Feder, the idea immediately came into my head that I had now found a way to one of the most essential pre-requisites for the founding of a new party. To my mind, Feder’s merit consisted in the ruthless and trenchant way in which he described the double character of the capital engaged in stock-exchange and loan transaction, laying bare the fact that this capital is ever and always dependent on the payment of interest. In fundamental questions his statements were so full of common sense that those who criticized him did not deny that au fond his ideas were sound but they doubted whether it be possible to put these ideas into practice. To me this seemed the strongest point in Feder’s teaching, though others considered it a weak point.

It is known, as Feder himself said, that his “theses and predictions were fully met in every essential point of the Economic Plan of the National Socialist Party, and precisely in the most important point: in the breaking of the slavery of interest on capital; this idea is found at the centre of the Party Program “because its conception is linked in the most keen and intimate way to our entire movement.”

That is, Adolf Hitler, who knew the “difficulty of putting its realisation into practice”, as in so many other things, did not hesitate to try and fulfilled the task, even at the risk of enmity from the universe in the hands of international usurers who lived and live on money interest.

We will never tire of insisting on highlighting this unique and definitive point, foundation, block of stone of the system and global universal idea of National Socialism: In the entire known History of human civilisation Aryan, Nazi and Hitlerist Germany alone has risen, as a nation, against usury and the slavery of interest on money, that shame of humanity, the exploitation of every man by a criminal bloodsucking minority that controls the entire system while playing both extremes into which the world divides, capitalist and Marxist, because both systems regard interest on capital as sacred and are in the same hidden hands and dependent on a same central point, a technocratic, imperialist and directive intelligence: the Messianic Imperialism of Zion, a parasitic anti-race that feeds, grows and lives without working or producing, like an intermediary, thanks to the diabolical invention of money interest.
This topic has been repeatedly discussed by us in the following recommended books: in Adolf Hitler: the Ultimate Avatar, in National Socialism: Only Solution for the Peoples of South America, and in the introduction to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its Application to Chile, each published recently and in circulation. These books also examine the next steps of the “Black International”, the “Dracula of Humanity”: The electronic transfer of funds and the replacement of paper and plastic money by electronic money; which is to say, by the “bodily mark of consumption”, when the ultimate enslavement and robotisation of the animal-men is complete, the rabbinic interpretation of the Talmud which considers non-Jews to be only animals with two legs, with Yahweh ordering that their enslavement and annihilation be fulfilled. (See National Socialism: Only Solution for the Peoples of South America.) Therefore our genial thinker Nicolas Palacios would write in 1904 that “when a Jew speaks of the love of humanity, even the rocks smile” (Chilean Race).
As in the cited works we have dealt with the theme in detail, here we only repeat that in the dawn of human communities money was a terrestrial material transformed into symbol (“things come to us eager to be transformed into symbols”, says Nietzsche), with the object of facilitating the exchange of products. Let us say, a quantity of amber for a horse. The money-symbol, the piece of gold, or copper, or bronze, or whatever, interpreted, replaced, facilitated commerce. And even in the loan one remains ignorant of the interest, usury, reproduction of the money, the metal, the “thing”, a symbol of itself, another parasite, another worm, pathogenic cancerous bacteria or virus that replicates itself enormously, becoming more important than the product and man-producer and worker, than the human being. Money (“Capital”) thus became the only centre of the universe, of civilisation. The “thing” (currency, money) became the principal merchandise, destroying the organic, destroying life. And the interest with which it is provided is reproduced ad infinitum, enabling its holder, its master, to live without work, without production, at the expense of the work and blood of Aryan and even non-Aryan toiling humanity, which has been reduced to slavery, the servitude of “interest on capital”.
This is the most diabolical invention that can be conceived, carried out by Talmudic rabbinical minds in faithful interpretation of the dictates of their Dracula-God, for the application of exploitation and suppression of non-Jews. Then one can understand the terror with which they saw the Hitlerist National Socialist miracle, and the application of the recommendations of Gottfried Feder for the breaking of the slavery of money interest. An entire millennial plan was about to be destroyed forever, because Hitler refused to pay the usurious interest on imposed debts and because Gottfried Feder advised the “Gordian” solution to end the payment of interests on interest for a debt without end, where the capital initially borrowed could never be cancelled: the declaration of bankruptcy by the State debtor; because bankruptcy is not bad for a nation on the brink. And because a State or country cannot be put in prison like an individual. And because Hitler returned to the sources of Aryan economics, human and divine (even the Gods traded accordingly), without usury, in which money would return to what it was before: a symbol of exchange and labour, representing the production and effort of man. Boss gold is replaced by Boss work, thereby returning to the barter of goods where currency only facilitates barter and only values what labour adds to economic goods. Usurious interest is abolished.
This was so great and so simple that life was about to undergo a transcendental reversal. A transmutation of all values. And National Socialist Germany in a very short time (Oh, so brief!), came to be as close to paradise as men had ever known in this world and these times. I have already said in my Preface to Mein Kampf: “Only then was it given to me for the only time (so brief!) to live in the present, because before and after then I have only dreamt of a future and yearned for a past…”
Now if Feder knew that a country could not go to jail for implementing his doctrines, he perhaps did not believe a universal war would be declared against it. His detractors did indeed believe exactly that, at a time when “the practical possibility of such a war’s realisation would be doubted.” Because the detractors went on to declare war and defeat a country materially. Hitler knew he had triumphed in a definitive way and for every time past and to come. Because already no one will be able to forget that National Socialism is the only system in the entirety of the known history of man that has risen against the bondage of money slavery, replacing Boss Gold with Boss Labour, thus realising a national socialism, not Jewish, not Judaic and enslaving, thereby terminating international and imperialist capitalism alike. A regimen of labour for workers on Earth, beyond classes and the exploitation of man by man.
His imposition and triumph have meant, by contagion and visible success, the disappearance of the parasite, the intermediary, that Anti-Race, scourge of the working humanity of this earth: the International Jew. Without the breeding ground of money interest, with loans and usury, the Jew would have been extirpated from this world, entirely alone, without need for malicious stories about “gas chambers” or “crematoria”. The wasp would have been deprived of its sting, the viper of its venom.
To understand in depth and extent what the socioeconomic system of National Socialism was able to achieve, even in the transformation of Aryan Germanic banking, it would suffice to glimpse the publications made by the “Deutschen Ueberseeischen Bank” in the year 1936, in Berlin, and circulated here in Valparaiso and Santiago. Banks without usury, without a fixed dollar monetary system, made to serve the producer, the worker, so that each can take care of himself by himself and by his own work, or the work of the workers, employees and managers. How different from the banks serving the Social Market System, the Jewish monetarism of a Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys”, that risible thing, that joke “popular capitalism” that has been implemented in Chile at present!
Therefore we say Hitler won the war, even losing it, because the world knows what he did. The new generations already know it, despite everything that has been done to keep them ignorant. Faced with the inevitable failure of the two systems the Jew controls, bourgeois capitalism and communist Marxism, National Socialism (Socialism that is National) alone shines like the sun, Boss Work against Boss Money, whether this be metal, paper, plastic or electronic. And so that humanity not see this sun and love it, the Jew has invented all those crimes and genocides of Nazism, trying to divert the view of those who want to face the sun. They succeeded, but only for a short time until the youth awoke and tired of the repeated and blatant gross lie. A situation already in process of irreversibly fulfilling itself. Because in the world of symbols and miracles that belongs to Hitler, Destiny moves a golden pendulum already coming back. And we deliver the triumph.

What would suffice would be for another country in the world, say, the so-called Third World, better yet, in Our America, but also in the Southern Cone of this America, regardless of the size of this country, to decide to implement National Socialism, without caring about or measuring the consequences though this be material defeat (which may or may not occur) at the hands of Judaism and international economic imperialism, the International Monetary Fund, etc.; it would suffice we say for the entire System of Usury to fall apart sooner or later and for a spiritual and redemptive air to strike the entire universe like lightning, from one end to the other.
Allow us to dream.
If in 1973 the military that overthrew the Jewish Marxist regime of Salvador Allende Gossens, instead of replacing it with a monetarist super-capitalism irreparably indebting the country to the International Bank and the Jewish imperialism of money, had instead implemented the regimen of Boss Work, or a socialism that is national, this Chilean People, forever defrauded and that believed like none other in the Army of their Fatherland, would have been totally delivered with unwavering faith, voluntarily willing every sacrifice and following their leaders to the death. It was the people, the workers in Germany, who were with Hitler until the end, without defection, without a betrayal, working in shifts in factories, while they fought in turns on the front. The Chilean tradition since the Conquest is the sacrificial and heroic life of the military camp, when they worked carrying the plough with one hand and the musket with the other, quick to defend their inheritance before the sudden attack of the Araucano warrior. And everyone ate from the same communal mess, soldiers and captains, which lasted for almost four hundred years. Chile, alone and embattled. That is the archetype of the Fatherland and our nationality.
But the Visigoth warriors had done this before them, as would Palacios, who respected the Führer Prinzip, like the Araucano respected that of the Cinche. (See my book Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Avatar.) The Army that came to govern Chile after the military coup of 1973 was a professional Army, formed in the framework of the liberal professions, within the bourgeois structures of society, an Army there to defend the frontiers, with a Prussian formation, it is true, and excellent professional skills, even though producing nothing for the collective, and not agriculturally exploiting the extensions of land that belong to them. Contrary to the Warrior Orders of the past, like those of the Templars or Teutonic Knights. Most of the components of these Armed Forces belong to the middle class and would have had no reason to defend the plutocracy of money, or implement a super-capitalism in Chile. Nevertheless, the High Command, the Commanders-in-Chief, are accustomed in democratic civilian regimes to receive orders from the President of the Republic and the civil power, and when this no longer exists in a country and the supreme power is in the hands of the Army, they are inclined, by “conditioned reflex”, to obey the intangible orders that come from the exterior, from the maximum power of money and the centre where money evidently rules and give the orders. In this case, the United States of America, the International Bank, the almighty Jew. Thus they harshly beat down what they find below, the existing defenceless citizens of their own country, and make genuflexion to imperialism and their foreign masters. Such is the typical psychology of the professional military man, but not of the warrior, who has no reason to be a military man, and who is usually a civilian. This picture has been continuously repeated in the world, especially in the underdeveloped world, as in Spain, with Franco. In Spain there were warriors, who were made to disappear to maintain the Francoist regime of privileges, class inequality and delivery to international capital. Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, the creator of National Syndicalism and the JONS, was the true hero and reformer, more than Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, although he was assassinated like Jose Antonio at the beginning of the Spanish War. Then Franco, the military bourgeois, liberal-professional, betrayed every one of them in the exterior and in the interior. And he remained in power for forty years without using them to fundamentally change anything, as we see at present in Spain. The same could happen in Chile. And in the history books our Army, of heroic tradition, could come to figure as one of those armies of the “Third World” that supported a Somoza, a Marcos, or a Batista, who were in power by the grace of economic imperialism and did so extravagantly when this came to be what they truly wanted. Another little country, another tropical army.
But it could be otherwise, because there existed a tradition of the life of the barricaded military camp, as we have said, and also of Prussian formation which involves “Prussian socialism”, to which Spengler referred and in 1973 that tradition allowed me to address the Chilean Military Junta, recommending it to them, as I reveal in my book Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Avatar.
What am I missing here? Why has everything turned out yet again to frustrate, disorient and disappoint the people of this noble country, destroying the soul of the new generation, which has inculcated the most ferocious materialism, preaching consumerism (Mammonitis, as Feder would say) and a technocratic, destructive and sterile concept of life? Perhaps it was what Portales called “sense of the ridiculous”, the “weight of the night”, lack of imagination and faith; lack of idealism, in a word, as always. Inability to play fully, fear and respect of the powerful, fear of the masters of capital, the “rich”, the necessity to obey orders from above — and hand them downwards. Disbelief that if we remain alone, no matter what happens (the archetype of Chile is a total solitude), faithful to our dreams, the people will never lose hope. And if this happens, we shall always overcome. And we will leave this world triumphant, in peace; because we have served our soul, our ideals, which are those of God. But here no one really believes in God.
Perhaps, in 1973, I was seeking a way out (we are not quite certain) and did not find it. In principle there was the support of the epidermal Nationalists, the “Anti-Marxists” of always, who believe it is enough to bow before a flag and a national hymn. There were no visible National Socialists to be found anywhere. But there was a team of economists prepared at the School of Chicago by the Jew Milton Friedman. They were taken into the Government and we suffer the consequences to the present day.
I maintain and insist that only National Socialism and its socioeconomic doctrine can take Chile and the South American continent out from the abyss into which they have been thrown. And that the solution of Gottfried Feder, as applied by Hitler, is the only solution that would allow us to free ourselves from enslavement to the interest on gigantic foreign debt, no solution other than not paying the debt and the declaration of the bankruptcy of States. In the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its Application to Chile, our executioners display the disasters that await us in the trap of borrowing and foreign debt. But Chile is determined to be the diligent student who punctually pays the interest on the interest of her debt, in order to be able to take on other loans (to make new interest payments) with the object of remaining grateful to the international powers, which are cold and unbribable.
All of which every time makes a coordinated South American solution to the anguished and urgent problem of foreign debt more impossible, because we are divided.
I further maintain that only when a professional Army is able to transmute itself into a Warrior Order, like the Teutonic or Templar, one moreover National Socialist and racialist, connected to a body — or “aura” — of invisible directors who are certainly not Freemasonry, would there yet exist the possibility of redemption.
To summarise. Even so, unanimity of more than one people and one nation is not necessary to courageously confront the eternal enemy and the enslaver of man, to fight and get out of criminal and extortionist imperialism, breaking the slavery of money interest. Enough that only one country decide to implement the National Socialist solution, with idealism and faith. And then no matter their material accounting index or physical size. They will be transformed into an invincible giant that will be victorious in the end. And Chile is the land of the sacred giants of the Andes. Land of the Morning Star. If a ruler rises to this height, acting the part of their greatness, then everyone will follow him to the death.

There is a fact not generally known and that, to reveal it again (as we did in the books cited), should give us more faith, since it shows us the occult side of events, the secret spiritual forces that assist us and confirm us in our solitude; there are invisible and invincible powers with unshakable faith and fanaticism in our ideals, with honour and loyalty.
Gottfried Feder, popularizer in his Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Money Interest of the economic concepts here presented, and that inspired Hitler to create the National Socialist Party, was a permanent member of a German Aryan esoteric order, the Thulegesellschaft, the Thule Society. Other permanent members were Rudolf Hess (for that reason in prison, for over forty years), with visiting members Dietrich Eckart, Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler himself.
This would mean the economic solution he found to destroy “the slavery to money interest”, and that signalled the incredible success of the National Socialist Government, of Adolf Hitler, was a magic operation prepared by an Aryan Spiritual Order, so as to destroy that other fateful and dark power of Cabalist, rabbinical and Jewish black magic, placed at the origin of history by Zionist Jewish imperialism, with the object of taking possession of the world and destroying non-Jewish humanity, according to the mandates of Jehovah and Talmudic precepts: the slavery of money interest.
The importance of this will never be sufficiently emphasized, since another dimension of the scenario in which our struggle is developed is thereby suddenly revealed. We are not alone! And, in the end, we will triumph!

What is more, once the authority of National Socialism was asserted in Germany, the Thule Society practically disappeared, giving way to the Black Order (Black Sun) of the SS, that not only adopted the same symbols of the Leftwards Swastika and ritual dagger with the emblem “My honour is called loyalty”, but also came to be directed by hidden and unknown guides who would have the same inspiration and powerful spiritual and magic forces, that are still acting in an inevitable way, they will give us final victory. With the return of the Wildes Heer, the Ultimate Battalion of the Führer!

Heil Hitler!
Sieg Heil!

MIGUEL SERRANO
Chilli-Mapu
March in the Year 97 of the Avatar

Translator’s Postscript:

The above text is the Introduction to the Spanish version of Gottfried Feder’s book. An excellent English translation of the same text can be found on-line at Amazon.books by entering the following information:

Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money by Gottfried Feder Kindle Edition by Gottfried Feder (Author), Hadding Scott (Translator)

A companion volume presenting the corresponding economic ideas developed within the English-speaking world can also be found on-line at Amazon.books using the following information:

Copied from New Order website (theneworder.com) News: Radio Interview with Matt Koehl
Commentary Monday, 18 April 2016:

On November 1, 2012, NEW ORDER founder Matt Koehl granted a rare radio interview to Deanna Spingola on her show “Spingola Speaks.” In this interview, Commander Koehl discusses in detail his essay The Good Society.

The essay was originally a presentation which Mr. Koehl made to a class of Ohio high school students. In it, he provides a sympathetic examination of the labor and social policies of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Germany.

For those who have only been exposed to a hostile, distorted depiction of the Third Reich as portrayed by its enemies, the information revealed by Matt Koehl will be a real eye-opener!

Online text: The complete text of The Good Society is posted on this website here.
Print Version: An illustrated print edition of The Good Society in booklet form is available from NS Publications for $8.00.